# Might I inquire?

Is N=2 large?queried  Kitano, Yamada and Yamazaki in their paper title. Exactly five months later, they co-wrote with Matsudo a paper titled “N=2 is large“, proving that their question was, after all, rhetorical.

Papers ask the darndest things. Collected below are titular posers from the field’s literature that keep us up at night.

### Who?

Who you gonna call?

### How?

How big are penguins?

How stable is the photon?
(Abstract: “Yes, the photon.”)

How heavy is the cold photon?

How much information is in a jet?

How fast can a black hole eat?

How black is a constituent quark?

How neutral are atoms?

How long does hydrogen live?

How does a pseudoscalar glueball come unglued?

How warm is too warm?

How degenerate can we be?

How the heck is it possible that a system emitting only a dozen particles can be described by fluid dynamics?

#### Bonus

How I spent my summer vacation

### Why?

Why is $\ F^2_\pi \gamma_{\rho \pi \pi^2}/m^2_\rho \cong 0$?

Why trust a theory?

Why be natural?

Why do things fall?

Why do we flush gas in gaseous detectors?

Why continue with nuclear physics?

What and why are Siberian snakes?

Why does the proton beam have a hole?

Why are physicists going underground?

Why unify?

Why do nucleons behave like nucleons inside nuclei and not like peas in a meson soup?

#### Bonus

The best why

Why I would be very sad if a Higgs boson were discovered

Why the proton is getting bigger

Why I think that dark matter has large self-interactions

Why Nature appears to ‘read books on free field theory’

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#### Nirmal Raj

Nirmal Raj is a postdoc at TRIUMF National Lab whose research is centered beyond the Standard Model, mostly on dark matter and new physics at the electroweak scale, and occasionally within the Standard Model in the form of supernova neutrinos. His favorite things include neutron stars, underground experiments, and particle colliders. Also, cryptic crosswords, writing short stories, and hiking in the Pacific Northwest.